Growth hacking is a buzzword you’ve likely heard, but what does it really mean in practical terms? The basic explanation of growth hacking is that it is a process of experimenting with marketing and product development techniques to find the most effective ways to grow a business. It’s about finding innovative shortcuts to quickly achieve massive growth on a limited budget.
But times have changed. Growth hacking was the word of the year back in 2012, but what does it mean in 2024 and beyond?
Well, the biggest difference lies in the availability of new AI tools.
If you are a startup founder, marketer, or entrepreneur, then growth hacking and AI offers you the opportunity to implement techniques to quickly boost your key business metrics, from customer acquisition to revenue generation and beyond
To give you a better idea of how to grow your business, we’ll look at some of today’s best growth hacking tools and strategies. We’ll cover various topics about how to apply them to areas like SEO, content marketing, conversion rate optimization, and customer engagement. You’ll learn growth mindsets and processes from top pioneers like Brian Dean and Neil Patel, as well as the current tools and platforms that speed up your online business’s growth.
AI tools have become the ultimate growth hacking sidekick, enabling businesses to uncover insights and automate experiments at scale.
The Power of AI in Growth Hacking
Growth hacking strategies rely heavily on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to uncover insights and optimize campaigns. All of this can now be done at speeds and scales that are not possible when doing them manually. This is more than just automating repetitive tasks, AI and ML enable growth hackers to:
- Quickly analyze massive amounts of data to identify patterns and trends, as well as opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed if done manually
- Create predictive models with ML to forecast which tactics will be most effective for a particular audience, campaign, or goal
- Personalize user experiences in real time based on behavioral data and attributes, allowing for increased pipeline generation and sales efficiency
- Test continuously and refine strategies to increase growth through experiments based on performance data and real-world information
One example is a situation where an AI-powered tool might analyze thousands of blog posts to determine which topics, headline structures, or promotional channels are most likely to drive traffic and engagement for a particular audience. With those insights, growth hackers can focus on creating and amplifying the highest-potential content for their target market.
AI and ML can give growth hackers a significant competitive advantage when used properly. They are tools to enhance your existing growth hacking strategies and are not a replacement for your own ingenuity and experience.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a crucial aspect of growth hacking that needs to be well-understood if you are going to increase your online sales. It involves focusing on increasing the percentage of website visitors who take desired actions, like making a purchase or filling out a form—it can be anything that you would like your visitor to do while on your website.
By leveraging AI-powered tools and implementing strategies that are based on your actual data, your business will see improvements in conversion rates and accelerate growth.
Unbounce
Unbounce provides a user-friendly interface for creating and performing A/B tests on landing pages. Tools like these can help streamline the process of creating and testing landing pages, but they do not guarantee that your CRO efforts will be successful.
How well you improve your CRO ultimately depends on a comprehensive understanding of user behavior and effective design principles, as well as continuous and proper so that you can optimize your approach based on facts.
Dynamic Yield
AI tools unlock valuable CRO insights and enable you to create personalized experiences for your users, which adds value to their time spent on your site. Dynamic Yield uses machine learning to analyze user data in real time and offer personalized content and product recommendations, which improves engagement and conversion rates.
Intercom
AI-powered chatbots, such as those powered by Intercom, can provide support at the right time to customers and also relay information to them, contributing to a better user experience and increased conversions.
Hotjar
If you want to identify areas for improvement in your online business then tools like Hotjar can help by generating heatmaps and session recordings while using user feedback to sculpt a more complete picture of your site’s current performance. This helps growth hackers pinpoint issues that may be causing visitors to leave the site before completing desired actions or abandoning sales.
By finding these issues and addressing them, you can continuously test and optimize your marketing strategy and effectively improve your conversion rates.
Customer Engagement and Retention Tools
Growth hacking tools create a way for site owners to send personalized and relevant communications across various channels to their customers to help keep your brand's messaging on point consistently. Neil Patel—co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar, and KISSmetrics—emphasizes the need for site owners to build strong customer relationships so that they can maintain an active and engaged community around their brands.
Chatbots have gained ground as a customer relationship management tool thanks to rapid developments in AI and large language models (LLMs). LLMs are able to accurately understand user inputs and are good enough to answer basic queries and direct users to the information that they need in real time on a website.
Drift
Drift is a leading conversational platform that focuses on marketing and sales, and has recently integrated Lfit AI’s buyer intent technology into its product, Drift Engage. It's a powerful combination of two impressive platforms that identifies and engages with high intent website visitors in real time, even if they are anonymous visitors.
The advanced behavioral scoring of Lift AI, along with Drift’s AI chatbots allows companies to communicate with anonymous users on an impressive scale when compared to traditional analytics that can only look at the data after the user has already left your site.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp allows you to create mail campaigns in minutes and is easier to use than ever. It has built-in ML that is baked right into the platform, which opens up new data for your team to analyze and test with their upcoming mail campaigns.
Your message has to find its way to the right people if you hope to succeed with any mail campaign, and to do this you need to look at segmenting audiences according to their preferences and interests. Mailchimp is great at this and helps marketers deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Customer Data Platforms
How much do you know about your customers? Do you know what they really want, and what will bring them to your website? CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) are another growth hacking tool that enables the gathering of customer engagement and retention data, which is where platforms like Segment and Tealium come into play. CDPs use ML to gather user information from various sources and compile it into a central location that can be used with other analytics tools, making it much easier for you to look at how well you are retaining visitors to your site.
A good starting point is to start experimenting with tracking website interactions and social media posts. It will allow you to create a single detailed view of each customer so that you can implement targeted and personalized marketing campaigns across multiple channels, such as email, social media channels, and paid advertising. CDPs empower your marketing team to track customer journeys and identify opportunities so that you are free to optimize your engagement strategy.
Amplero
Predictive analytics is another area where AI is transforming customer engagement and retention. Tools like Amplero use machine learning algorithms to analyze user information and predict future behavior, such as the likelihood of churn or the propensity to make a purchase.
Antavo
Antavo uses machine learning for its loyalty program experiences that are based on individual customer preferences. It analyzes purchase histories, engagement levels, and other data points so that it can tailor customer rewards and incentives. Growth hacking tools that enhance your loyalty programs can also provide valuable insights into customer preferences and behavior, enabling marketers to refine their retention strategies over time.
Customer Success Platforms
Gainsight and Totango are Customer Success Platforms (CSP) that are indispensable tools for marketers that focus on B2B customer retention. These platforms use machine learning to analyze customer data, such as product usage, support tickets, and engagement levels, to identify potential risks or opportunities for growth.
By providing customer success teams with real-time insights and automated workflows, these marketing tools help businesses proactively engage customers, deliver value, and prevent churn. AI-powered customer success platforms can also help businesses identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, driving revenue growth and long-term customer value.
Customer engagement and retention tools are essential for businesses looking to build lasting relationships with their customers. As Neil Patel has emphasized, investing in customer engagement and retention is crucial for sustainable business success, and AI-powered tools have made it more accessible to the average digital marketer than ever.
Analytics and User Behavior Insights Tools
Knowing what your customers want can be difficult to achieve. In the past, companies have tried to use engagement tools to talk with prospects and attempt to uncover what they need, but by the time they reach out to the customer it’s already too late, or they don’t get the results they need. That’s where website buyer intent comes into play.
Lift AI
Lift AI is a trailblazer in real-time buyer intent technology, uniquely designed to identify and engage anonymous visitors on your website. Unlike traditional analytics tools that only provide backward-looking insights, Lift AI is built upon a proprietary machine-learning model to offer forward-looking, actionable intelligence. This enables businesses to interact with potential customers at the peak of their buying intent and extract the full potential of their websites.
Key Lift AI advantages include:
- Real-Time Intent Scoring: It evaluates every visitor's behavior in real time to accurately predict buying intent, enabling immediate engagement with high-intent prospects—those most likely to buy.
- Unveiling Anonymous Visitors: It uniquely identifies the buying intent of anonymous website traffic, a capability not possible in other platforms. This lets you tap into a previously inaccessible segment of potential customers, enabling a website-first funnel approach.
- Enhanced Customer Experiences: Lift AI lets you personalize website visitor engagement based on their intent level. Visitors scored as having high intent can then be directed to a live salesperson, for example, where someone with medium intent may be served tailored content or interact with a chatbot.
- Integrations with Existing Tools: Lift AI seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack to enhance your favorite tools and technologies with real-time buyer intent data.
- Unprecedented Results: Businesses using Lift AI report dramatically boosting sales productivity, pipeline generation, and revenue potential.
Overall, Lift AI not only predicts the intent of every website visitor but also provides the means to act on it immediately, ensuring that no potential customer engagement opportunity is missed. This approach not only maximizes the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts but also provides a significant return on investment, enhancing both the customer experience and your business' bottom line.
Google Analytics
You probably already know about Google Analytics (GA), the free tool that is offered by Google for all website owners who wish to implement it. Google Analytics is perhaps one of the most widely used web analytics platforms out there, and it is useful for anyone who is trying to attract Google search traffic to their websites and uncover hidden metrics about what strategies are working and what aren't.
GA is free and has been providing a wealth of data on website traffic and user activities for many years. The latest iteration, GA4, is not as user-friendly as previous versions and does take some effort to configure it correctly, especially if you want to use it to track conversion rates and sales.
GA4 uses machine learning extensively to process and analyze vast amounts of website data so that you can create reports. It offers marketers many insights that can be used for optimizing strategies, but it does lack some features when compared to commercial offerings that are available.
Google is still a major traffic source for online businesses, even if things have been erratic since the recent Google Core updates. This makes Google Analytics a popular choice, mainly because of its ability to track user actions across multiple devices and channels.
Armed with this information, you have an overview of the different customer journeys that take across your website every day. Cross-device tracking provides you with information that will help you to understand how users interact with brands across different elements of your website like website visits and mobile app usage.
Google Analytics has features like predictive analytics, goal forecasting, and smart lists. Goal forecasting uses machine learning algorithms to predict future conversions based on your site's historical data. Smart lists automatically generate segments of users who are most likely to convert based on their behavior, enabling marketers to focus their efforts on high-value prospects.
Selecting AI Tools for Different Business Sizes
Something that you should probably ask yourself before signing up for a commercial solution is to think about what you are trying to achieve with your growth hacking tool.
Choosing AI tools for growth hacking means that you must understand why you want AI tools in the first place. What are you tracking? What metrics are important to you? What size is your business? In most cases, you might not even need a commercial solution if you are just starting out.
For blogs, startups, and small businesses with limited budgets there are several free and open-source AI tools available, which can provide a cost-effective way to use AI without overspending or spending any money at all.
If you are looking for more extensive enterprise solutions that emphasize AI and systems integration, then you will want advanced reporting capabilities that are good at handling vast amounts of data. These solutions usually integrate with pre-existing systems, providing improved reporting and other essential services tailored to larger marketing teams.
If you are responsible for generating reports, then you know the value of advanced features for sales projections and traffic trends. Other features you will need include predictive analytics with integrated machine learning, along with detailed reporting capabilities that will help you show data to the decision-makers who are responsible for creating your marketing strategies.
How to Choose the Right AI Tool for Your Team or Company
As a growth marketer or business leader, choosing the right AI tool to enhance your growth hacking efforts is crucial. Consider these six key steps that will help you choose a tool that meets your needs and seamlessly integrates with your existing processes.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step that you should take is to clearly outline your marketing objectives and the specific results that you are after. You will need to identify any operational needs that your current platform isn’t giving you and prioritize the features that you know you don’t currently have in your toolbox.
Analyze your current metrics and identify the areas in your customer journey and sales funnel that provide the most growth opportunities.
2. Evaluate Integration Capabilities
Integration with your existing systems is very important when it comes to implementing a new growth hacking tool. Having a tool that can seamlessly integrate with your existing marketing stack takes a lot of difficulty out of analyzing your analytics and other data sources so it is a must-have feature.
Integrations allow you to have a smooth transition to your new workflows and let you finally use the full potential of your current setup while incorporating new AI capabilities as you learn how your new AI tools work.
3. Prioritize User-Friendly Interfaces
Not many people think about this consciously, but if you are looking at a new tool then you have to make sure that it is easy to use for you and your team. Look at basics like how easy it is to read the data visualizations like graphs and charts, and how well the key features work within the app.
If the system is intense and has a steep learning curve, then factor in training and onboarding if needed so that you can help your team quickly adopt a new tool and use it effectively enough to complete daily tasks without too much trouble.
4. Sign Up for a Trial or Demo
Before fully committing to any growth hacking tool, you will have to conduct tests and proof-of-concept projects to assess how well the tool works with your existing processes, as well as the impact that it will have on your growth hacking strategy.
A hands-on evaluation helps you see how well the tools and features will work for your specific requirements and is a step that you cannot afford to not take when looking at AI tools.
5. Assess Customer Support and Resources
A good test to perform during your trial period is to evaluate how well the customer support does, as well as the resources that are available online. Look out for documentation, forums, chat platforms, and other resources that can help your team quickly if they have any questions or issues.
6. Consider Scalability and Pricing
As your business grows, scalability is going to be an area that you need to be aware of. Look into the AI tool’s scaling capabilities and its pricing model, and make sure the tool will be able to accommodate your business growth as time goes by.
Perhaps even more important is the pricing and if it aligns with your budget. Factor in the ROI of the investment in the software that you are going to make so that you have a realistic idea of how the tool will fit in with your growth strategy.
These six steps are pivotal in finding out how well a tool will fit in with your existing processes, which is why evaluations are so important. Select the AI tool that will allow your team to fully implement your growth hacking strategy and drive results that you can measure against real data.
You have to understand how well the product will support your long-term business objectives as you implement its features into your growth strategy.
Case Study: Lift AI - A Paradigm of AI in Growth Hacking
Understanding and reacting to consumer behavior at the right time can dramatically increase your engagement strategy's effectiveness. Lift AI is leading the charge in this transformation by using tested machine-learning models to identify high-intent visitors in real time, allowing you to better prioritize prospect outreach and close more deals faster.
Unlike other growth hacking tools that often only provide incremental improvements, Lift AI can quickly surface untapped revenue potential and exponential growth opportunities.
Let's look at a few Lift AI customer success stories to understand the full impact buyer intent data can have.
Chronus Grows Conversation to Pipeline Conversion from 3.4% to 39.3%
Chronus, an employee-driven development platform, implemented a Lift AI buyer intent strategy to score the real-time behavior of every website visitor. The company then created playbook experiences in Drift so high intent visitors were connected immediately to sales resources while medium and low intent visitors were directed to automated playbooks.
The results were impressive: 85% of the resulting Chronus website pipeline came from the 73% of website visitors that were completely anonymous except for a Lift AI buyer intent score.
This created a significant new revenue stream for Chronus from their website. The interesting thing about this exercise is that they discovered that anonymous visitors scored as having high buyer intent, which then converted into sales-qualified opportunities (SQOs) 4x more than visitors that were identified as part of the ABM program.
Truckstop Increases Monthly ARR Booking by 5x in 5 Months
Truckstop is a software company in the freight industry that has had incredible results with Lift AI since implementing it into its website. Truckstop discovered who their high-intent website visitors were based on their real-time behavior, which led to some incredible ROI.
One Lift AI High Intent playbook added an incremental ARR in the first 30 days, providing an immediate 3.8x ROI on Lift AI's monthly costs. By the fifth month, the results really started to take off, and Lift AI's High Intent playbook added an incremental ARR of 27x ROI.
These case studies demonstrate the power of AI in growth hacking, showcasing how platforms like Lift AI can drive tangible business results by leveraging machine learning and real-time data analysis. By identifying high-intent visitors and engaging them with targeted personalized experiences, businesses can significantly improve conversion rates, reduce customer acquisition costs, and unlock new growth opportunities.
As artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to evolve and mature, they will undoubtedly play an increasingly critical role in the future of growth hacking.
Harnessing AI for Growth: Key Takeaways for 2024
As we wrap up our guide to the most effective growth hacking tools for 2024, it's evident that artificial intelligence and machine learning are critical for modern marketing strategies. These technologies have proven to be more than just enhancements; they are now fundamental in shaping effective marketing approaches, from analyzing content strategies with predictive analytics to tailoring customer interactions in real time.
Tools like Lift AI are at the forefront, transforming how businesses engage with potential customers. Lift AI's ability to score buyer intent in real-time is a game changer, turning passive site visitors into active opportunities and enabling businesses to focus on prospects most likely to convert.
For growth marketers aiming to stay competitive, it's crucial to adopt and adapt to these advanced technologies continuously. As AI and ML continue to advance, they will unveil new methods and tools for driving growth. By embracing these innovations, your marketing strategies will not only keep pace with digital transformations but also set new benchmarks for success in our rapidly evolving digital world.
